Owned by Desire: A Memoir of Bodies, Boundaries, and Becoming

The First Surge I Couldn’t Shut Off

I do not remember the first moment as a dramatic one. There was no warning bell, no visible change, no clean dividing line between the girl I had been and the person I became afterward. At first, it felt like a strange interruption—a sensation that arrived without permission and refused to leave when I asked it to. I assumed it would pass. Most things did.

But this did not.

The feeling settled into my body with a persistence I could not explain. It was not connected to desire in the way I understood desire. There was no particular person, no fantasy I had chosen, no touch that had caused it. It simply appeared, intense and private, and made itself impossible to ignore. My body seemed to be speaking in a language I had never learned, repeating the same message until every other thought became difficult to hear.

I tried to treat it like a temporary problem. I waited for it to fade. I shifted my position. I distracted myself. I told myself that everyone experienced strange sensations sometimes, that I was being dramatic, that the discomfort was probably anxiety or tiredness or something I had eaten. I searched for ordinary explanations because ordinary explanations were easier to survive.

The trouble was that the feeling did not behave like anything ordinary. It did not follow my mood. It did not respond to reason. It did not appear only when I wanted it to. My mind could be occupied with something completely unrelated, yet my body would pull my attention back toward itself. It was as if a switch had been turned on somewhere inside me, and whoever had flipped it had walked away without telling me how to turn it off.

That was the first betrayal: my body continuing without me.

Before then, I had believed that being inside my body meant belonging to it. I assumed that my thoughts and my physical self moved together, that one could guide the other. If I was uncomfortable, I could adjust. If I was afraid, I could calm myself. If I wanted something to stop, I could make it stop—or at least try.

Now my body had developed a will of its own. It demanded attention while I was trying to live. It turned ordinary moments into negotiations. I began measuring time by how long I could endure the sensation before it became impossible to focus. I became alert to every change inside me, every rise and fall, every possibility that the feeling might intensify. Even when nothing was happening, I was waiting for it to happen again.

That waiting changed me.

I became careful in ways no one could see. I monitored my movements. I noticed where I sat, how I stood, and whether anyone might look closely enough to realize that I was struggling. I was afraid of my own face betraying me. A blush, a pause, a distracted expression—any small sign could become evidence in a story I did not know how to explain.

The fear was not only that people would misunderstand me. It was that they might understand me too quickly.

There were already words available for a woman whose body seemed hungry all the time. Those words were cruel, familiar, and easy to attach. Too much. Shameless. Obsessed. Available. I knew how quickly a private experience could be turned into a judgment about character. I did not want anyone to look at me and decide that the sensations I could not control revealed what I wanted, what I valued, or who I was.

So I hid.

I hid from questions, from glances, from conversations that came too close to the subject. I hid even from myself by refusing to examine the experience for too long. If I did not name it, perhaps it could remain temporary. If I did not tell anyone, perhaps it did not count as real. Silence became the first boundary I built around my body, though it was a weak one. The feeling crossed it whenever it pleased.

Some days, I could almost persuade myself that I was managing. I would move through the hours, answer when spoken to, complete whatever was expected of me, and pretend that my attention belonged entirely to the world outside. But beneath that performance, I was constantly negotiating with an invisible force. I was trying to look normal while carrying a secret that made normality feel like work.

The hardest part was the loneliness of an experience without a clear shape. Pain had language. Illness had language. Even embarrassment could be explained if I found the courage to describe what had happened. But this sensation seemed to exist outside the categories I trusted. It was physical, yet it was also psychological. It felt intimate, yet it was not chosen. It was connected to sexuality, yet it did not feel like freedom or pleasure. It was consuming without being mine.

I was afraid that saying this aloud would make people laugh. Worse, I was afraid they would not laugh. They might become serious, watchful, or suspicious. They might ask questions I could not answer. They might hear the word desire and ignore everything that made it frightening.

There was a terrible confusion in having a body that looked as if it wanted something while I was begging it to stop. From the outside, those two truths could appear impossible. Inside me, they existed at the same time. That contradiction made me doubt my own experience. If my body reacted, did that mean I wanted the reaction? If I wanted it to end, why would it continue? If I could not control it, what part of me was responsible?

I kept returning to those questions, though none of them brought relief. Instead, they tightened the secret around me. I began to feel that my body had made me dangerous—not dangerous to others, but dangerous to my own understanding of myself. Every surge threatened to expose a version of me I did not recognize.

I wanted a switch. I wanted a rule. I wanted one clear instruction that would return me to the person I had been before this began. Rest. Breathe. Think of something else. Go somewhere private. Be patient. I tried to believe that control was only a matter of effort. If I failed to stop the feeling, then perhaps I had not tried hard enough.

That belief was easier than accepting the truth: I did not know how to stop it at all.

And while I searched for a way to make my body quiet, the rest of my life continued around me, unaware that every ordinary moment had become a test of endurance.

Googling What I Couldn’t Say Out Loud

I did not tell anyone what was happening. I began with the only person I trusted enough to approach without having to look into her eyes: the search bar.

I waited until I was alone, then opened my laptop and typed the words slowly, as if the machine might judge me for them. At first, I chose safer language. I searched for why my body felt restless, why I could not make the sensation stop, why arousal could arrive without permission and remain long after I had tried to ignore it. I erased each question before writing the next one. Even alone in my room, I felt exposed.

The results were worse than silence. They were crowded with jokes, advertisements, instructions, promises, and warnings. The language was either clinical or cruel. Bodies like mine appeared to belong to entertainment, not to medicine. I clicked through pages with my heart beating too hard, looking for one sentence that would tell me I was not inventing this. Instead, I found words that made me feel more alone: excessive, hypersexual, insatiable, abnormal.

I understood how quickly a search could become a verdict. A stranger on a screen could look at a few symptoms and turn them into a personality. If I felt desire too often, perhaps I was simply the kind of woman people already expected me to be. Perhaps I was shameless. Perhaps I wanted attention. Perhaps I was lying to myself about how little control I had.

That possibility frightened me more than the sensation itself.

I had grown up understanding that desire was supposed to be private, measured, and controlled. It could be admitted only under the right conditions, with the right person, in the right way. Desire was something a woman might possess, but never something that was allowed to possess her. If it became visible, it could be used against her. If it became difficult to hide, she became the problem.

So I searched for explanations that would protect me from being called too much. I looked for evidence that I was stressed, lonely, confused, or simply going through some temporary change. I searched phrases without using the words I feared most. I searched late at night, then again in the morning, as though the answers might alter themselves while I slept.

They did not.

The more I read, the more I noticed the difference between wanting something and being unable to escape the feeling of wanting. That difference was difficult to explain, even to myself. Desire usually seemed to point somewhere. It had an object, a direction, a beginning. What was happening to me felt less like a choice and more like a signal that had become trapped in the on position. It did not wait for permission. It did not care whether I was busy, frightened, tired, or trying to be ordinary.

I kept returning to that idea: ordinary.

I wanted to be ordinary so badly that I began measuring my life by how well I could imitate it. I watched other people move through their days and wondered whether their bodies were quiet inside them. Maybe they could sit through a conversation without being distracted by themselves. Maybe they could read, study, walk, or fall asleep without having to negotiate with sensations that demanded their attention. Maybe their bodies did not interrupt them every few minutes to remind them that they were vulnerable.

I did not know how to ask anyone if this was normal. The question itself seemed impossible. It sounded like a confession disguised as a request for information.

There were moments when I typed the word sex, stared at it, and deleted it. The word felt too blunt. Then I typed arousal, which felt more accurate and somehow more dangerous. I searched pain, pressure, sensitivity, discomfort. I searched without committing to any word long enough to let it become mine. My browser history began to resemble the trail of a person trying to disappear while leaving clues behind.

Eventually, I found the term Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder.

I read it once and looked away. The phrase was so formal that it seemed unrelated to me, as though it belonged to a textbook or to a person with a condition far more legitimate than mine. I read it again. Persistent. Genital. Arousal. Disorder.

Each word landed separately.

Persistent meant that the feeling was not a passing impulse. Genital meant that I could not pretend the problem lived only in my thoughts. Arousal described what I had been too embarrassed to name. Disorder was the word that made my stomach tighten. It gave the experience a shape, but it also made the shape official. If I accepted the term, I would no longer be able to dismiss what was happening as a strange phase.

Still, I kept reading.

The descriptions did not make me feel cured. They did something smaller and, at that moment, more important: they made me feel recognized. There was language for unwanted arousal. There was language for sensations that could arrive without sexual desire. There was language for the exhaustion of living in a body that kept producing a response the mind had not chosen.

I read the same paragraphs until the words blurred. I searched for personal stories and found fragments from people who sounded afraid of the same things I was afraid of. They worried about being misunderstood. They worried that doctors would not believe them. They worried that partners would mistake symptoms for invitations. They worried about becoming their diagnosis in the eyes of everyone around them.

I recognized the fear before I recognized the people.

The internet offered no safe way to say, I am not asking for this. I am not trying to seduce anyone. I am not proving anything about my character. My body is making a demand I did not make.

So I said it silently, reading the sentence back to myself. I am not asking for this.

The sentence became a small boundary. It did not stop the sensations, but it separated me from them. I could begin to understand that feeling aroused did not mean I wanted an encounter, a person, or an explanation forced on me. My body could produce a response, and I could still have a mind that disagreed with it.

That distinction should have comforted me. Instead, it terrified me. If my body and my desire could move in different directions, then which one would other people believe? If I said no while my body seemed to say something else, would my no still matter?

I closed the laptop and sat in the dark, listening to the room settle around me. The search results remained behind the screen, waiting. I had found a name, but a name was not the same as safety. It could not tell me how to speak. It could not promise that anyone would listen without laughing, doubting, or looking at me differently.

The next morning, I carried the phrase with me like a secret folded into my pocket. I was not ready to say it aloud. I was barely ready to think it. But having a name changed the silence. It no longer felt empty. It felt watched, measured, and frighteningly real—and soon I would have to decide whether to bring that reality into a room with another person.

Trying to Sit Still in a Classroom on Fire

After I found words that came close to describing what was happening, the words did not make the feeling disappear. My body remained where it had been all along: alert, restless, and impossible to reason with. I could read about what I was experiencing and still feel completely alone inside it. Knowing that something had a name was not the same as knowing how to live with it.

The hardest places were classrooms. They were built for stillness. Desks faced forward. Students were expected to listen, take notes, raise their hands, and keep their bodies under control. Every part of the room seemed to depend on the idea that a person could simply decide how to sit. I had always understood that rule without thinking about it. Then my body began treating the classroom like a place of emergency.

I would take my seat and try to arrange myself carefully. I kept my back straight. I placed my hands where they looked natural. I focused on the professor’s voice, on the movement of a pen across paper, on anything that might pull my attention away from the sensations rising through me. But the more I tried not to notice my body, the more intensely it demanded to be noticed.

It was not desire in the simple, manageable sense people joked about. It did not arrive with a clear beginning or wait for permission. It could appear while I was listening to a lecture, reading a sentence, or trying to remember something I had studied. It made ordinary concentration feel like a task performed beside an open flame. I could remain in the room, but I could not feel safe inside myself.

The classroom around me continued as if nothing were wrong. Someone shifted a chair. Pages turned. A pen clicked once, then again. The professor explained an idea that everyone else seemed able to receive without difficulty. I watched faces, searching for evidence that anyone noticed what I was fighting. No one looked alarmed. No one looked at me with recognition. That should have comforted me. Instead, it made the secret feel heavier.

I became frightened of movement. If I adjusted my position, would someone interpret it? If I stood up, would they wonder why? If I left the room, would my absence become a confession? Even ordinary actions began to seem dangerous because I no longer trusted the meaning other people might assign to them. I was afraid of looking uncomfortable, afraid of looking eager, afraid of looking like the person I feared I was becoming.

The phrase “too much” followed me everywhere. Too much feeling. Too much need. Too much awareness of sex in a world that expected young women to be desirable only under controlled conditions. Desire could be admired when it remained distant and flattering, when it belonged to a story or a joke. Mine did not remain distant. It had moved into my body and begun speaking without me.

I did not know how to explain that distinction. If I told someone I felt aroused, they might imagine a choice behind the feeling. They might assume I had encouraged it, wanted it, or knew what to do with it. They might hear only the sexual word and miss the fear surrounding it. I was not asking to be provocative. I was trying to survive an experience that made every quiet moment feel exposed.

So I practiced appearing ordinary. I lowered my eyes. I made myself write even when the words on the page blurred into shapes without meaning. I nodded at the appropriate moments. When the class ended, I waited before moving, as if the passage of a few seconds might restore control. Sometimes I gathered my things slowly. Sometimes I rushed. Neither choice made me feel less visible.

The loneliness came from having to perform calm while feeling anything but calm. People around me could see a student sitting at a desk. They could not see the argument taking place inside me: one part of me insisting that I stay still, another part of me reacting to sensations I had not invited. I began to understand that a body could betray a person without making a sound.

That betrayal affected more than my attention. It changed the way I occupied space. I became cautious about closeness, about eye contact, about the possibility of being misunderstood. A classmate’s glance could feel like an accusation even when it meant nothing. A professor’s question could make my heart race for reasons I could not safely reveal. The ordinary structure of education—being seen, being evaluated, being called upon—became tangled with the fear that someone might discover what I was trying to hide.

I wondered whether this was what people meant when they talked about self-control. Perhaps everyone else was also fighting invisible battles and had simply learned better ways to conceal them. Or perhaps I was uniquely defective, the only person whose body refused to follow the rules. That uncertainty was cruel. It left me with no standard against which to measure myself, no way to know whether I was frightened by something unusual or merely weak in the face of something normal.

At times, I blamed myself for paying attention. Maybe I had made the sensations stronger by fearing them. Maybe thinking about them had created a loop I could have broken if I had been disciplined enough. I tried to redirect my thoughts toward coursework, toward plans for the day, toward anything respectable and safe. But the effort itself reminded me of the problem. I was never simply studying. I was studying while trying not to feel my own body.

The pressure followed me beyond the classroom. It waited in hallways, in quiet rooms, in the spaces between one obligation and the next. Yet classrooms gave it a particular shape because they demanded stillness in public. There, I had to prove that I was present while feeling separated from myself. I listened to lessons about subjects outside me while my attention kept returning to the body I could not leave behind.

I started measuring time differently. A lecture was no longer a lecture; it was the number of minutes until I could stand. An assignment was no longer only an assignment; it was another chance to lose focus and another reason to feel ashamed. The future seemed less like a path opening before me and more like a series of rooms where I would have to hide the same truth.

Still, I kept showing up. I sat at the desk. I held the pen. I tried to learn. That effort did not feel brave then. It felt desperate, almost mechanical. But looking back, I can see that I was refusing to let the mystery inside my body take everything from me. I did not understand it yet, and I could not control it, but I continued moving through the world as if I had the right to be there.

The right to be there was different from the feeling of belonging. Inside those classrooms, I felt like an intruder in my own life. I was present, but divided: the girl everyone could see and the private, panicked body no one knew. Between them, I kept trying to sit still while everything inside me burned.

The Doctor Who Laughed and the Nurse Who Didn’t

By the time I asked for help, I had already practiced the story so many times that it no longer sounded like something that had happened to me. I arranged the words in my mind, removed the ones that felt too embarrassing, and replaced them with safer expressions. Discomfort. Sensitivity. An unusual sensation. Anything except the truth: my body kept moving toward arousal when I did not want it to, and I could not make it stop.

The clinic was bright in the way places become bright when they are trying to look clean. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, pressing one thumb against the other. Every small movement seemed dangerous. The chair, the waiting room, the silence between names being called—everything made me aware of myself. I wanted to disappear before anyone asked why I was there.

When the doctor finally saw me, I began with the version I had prepared. I spoke carefully, watching his face for a sign that I had chosen the wrong words. I explained that the sensations came without invitation. That they did not match my thoughts or my wishes. That sometimes they lasted so long they swallowed the rest of the day. I told him I was frightened by how little control I seemed to have over my own body.

He listened, or appeared to. Then he laughed.

It was not a great laugh. It was brief, almost casual, but it landed heavily. For a second I wondered whether I had misunderstood him. Perhaps he was laughing at something else, at a thought that had crossed his mind, at the awkwardness of the consultation. But his expression made the meaning clear enough. My fear had become absurd in the room. My confession had been turned into something light.

I felt heat rise into my face. The sensations that had driven me there were suddenly less important than the shame of having described them. I wished I had said nothing. I wished I could pull the words back into my mouth and leave with my secret intact.

“Maybe you’re just thinking about sex too much,” he said.

The sentence was simple, but it seemed to rearrange the room. There I was, trying to explain that the experience did not begin with desire, did not obey desire, and did not end when I wanted it to. Yet he placed it inside the smallest explanation available: I was young, I had a body, and perhaps I was being dramatic about wanting something.

I wanted to tell him that wanting and suffering were not the same thing. I wanted to say that desire could be chosen, imagined, welcomed. This was different. This arrived without permission and stayed beyond my control. It did not make me feel powerful or sensual. It made me feel trapped inside an alarm that no one else could hear.

But the words remained behind my teeth. The doctor had already decided what I was. Too aware. Too eager. Too much. If I argued, I feared I would prove him right. If I cried, I would become even more embarrassing. So I lowered my eyes and nodded in the way people nod when they want a conversation to end.

He offered no explanation that made the experience less frightening. No name I could hold on to. No clear path through it. The appointment ended with the same uncertainty I had carried in, except now it had been joined by humiliation. I left the room feeling that I had not only failed to receive help; I had failed some test of respectable womanhood.

In the hallway, the nurse was standing near the desk. She had been there when I arrived, though I had avoided looking at her for too long. Now she watched me closely. I tried to walk past as if nothing had happened, as if my face were not burning and my body were not still betraying me beneath my clothes.

She stopped me gently.

“Are you all right?”

The question almost undid me. Not because it was complicated, but because it was the first question anyone had asked without already supplying the answer. I opened my mouth and found that I could not speak. The doctor had laughed, and suddenly I had begun to doubt the reality of my own pain. The nurse seemed to notice that hesitation.

She did not laugh.

She did not look amused, suspicious, or hungry for details. She did not treat my fear as a joke or my body as evidence against me. She simply waited. That patience made it possible for me to breathe.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” I said.

It was not the polished version. It was not clinical or careful. It was the sentence underneath everything else.

The nurse’s face changed—not dramatically, not in a way that promised rescue, but enough for me to recognize concern. She told me that what I was describing sounded real to her. Real did not mean understood. Real did not mean solved. But it meant I had not invented it merely because another person had failed to take it seriously.

That distinction became a small place to stand.

She did not claim to know what was wrong. She did not offer a miraculous answer or pretend that one appointment could return my body to me. Instead, she listened while I repeated myself, stumbling over the same facts. The sensations came without permission. They interfered with everything. I was afraid people would think I was enjoying them. I was afraid that, perhaps, I was the kind of person who could not be trusted around her own desire.

The nurse never told me I was too much. She never said I should be grateful for what my body was giving me. She understood, or came close enough to understanding, that an experience could resemble pleasure and still be painful. That a body could produce an intense sensation without producing consent. That being physically responsive did not reveal what I wanted.

I held on to that silently.

Still, I left the clinic without a diagnosis. The nurse’s kindness could not erase the doctor’s laughter. It could not explain why my body had become so unpredictable, or tell me how long the problem would last. I carried both moments with me: the dismissal and the recognition, the laugh and the quiet refusal to laugh along.

Outside, the day continued as if nothing had changed. People moved around me with their ordinary purposes. I wondered how many of them knew that a person could walk through a crowded street while feeling completely alone inside her skin.

I had gone looking for an authority who might tell me what was happening. Instead, I received a judgment from one person and a fragile confirmation from another. It was not enough to make me feel safe, but it was enough to keep me searching.

For the first time, I understood that the worst part was not only the sensation itself. It was the fear that no one would believe me unless I made myself smaller, quieter, more acceptable. I had entered the clinic hoping to be cured of my body. I left wondering whether I could learn to speak about it without surrendering the right to define what it meant.

Naming PGAD and the Terror of Being Real

The word came to me before understanding did.

PGAD.

It looked harmless on the screen, almost clinical enough to belong to someone else. Four letters arranged into a condition, a definition, a place where a person’s confusion could be filed. Yet when I read what they stood for—Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder—I felt something inside me become visible. Not healed. Not explained. Visible.

That was the first terror.

Until then, I had been living inside a private contradiction. My body was constantly speaking, but I had no language for what it was saying. The sensations arrived without permission and stayed longer than they should have. They did not obey my plans, my surroundings, my mood, or my attempts to dismiss them. They made ordinary moments feel dangerous. Sitting in class, trying to listen, trying to look like everyone else, I could feel the distance between the person I appeared to be and the person my body insisted on creating.

Now there was a name for that distance.

I read the letters again and again, as if repetition might make them less frightening. Instead, the word seemed to grow heavier. It did not sound like a temporary embarrassment or a passing phase. It sounded permanent. It sounded like a diagnosis that could follow me into every room, every relationship, every version of the future I had once imagined for myself.

PGAD.

Even saying it silently felt like an admission. I was not simply distracted. I was not inventing the problem. I was not weak, immoral, or secretly asking for the attention my body demanded. Something was happening to me that I could not control. The discovery offered relief, but relief was not the same as safety. A name could explain the fear while also giving it a shape.

And once fear had a shape, I could no longer pretend it was nothing.

I became afraid of being real.

Before the word, I could still bargain with myself. I could call the sensations strange, inconvenient, excessive, or temporary. I could tell myself that everyone had private experiences they did not discuss. I could keep the whole thing blurred at the edges. But PGAD was sharp. It stood between me and all the excuses I had been using to survive the day.

The name also carried a question I did not know how to answer: what did this make me?

I had already been afraid of being too much. Too aware. Too hungry. Too affected by sensations that seemed to control me instead of the other way around. I feared that if anyone knew, they would not see the distress underneath. They would see only the sexual meaning attached to the condition. They would reduce me to desire and decide that desire was my truest feature.

That possibility frightened me more than the word itself.

I did not want to be mistaken for someone who had chosen this. I did not want my body’s persistence to become evidence against my character. I did not want people to hear the name of the disorder and imagine permission, invitation, or pleasure where I experienced exhaustion and fear. My body could react without my consent, but I knew the world did not always respect the difference between a reaction and a choice.

So I kept the word close and hidden.

It became another secret carried under my clothes, beneath conversations, behind expressions I practiced until they looked natural. I learned to move through the day while guarding information no one else could see. Every ordinary interaction seemed to hold the possibility of discovery. A question asked too directly. A glance that lasted too long. A moment when my face betrayed what I was trying to bury.

I imagined explanations and rejected them before they could reach my mouth.

How could I tell someone that my body had become a source of constant alarm? How could I describe it without sounding dramatic? How could I say that the sensations were not proof of what I wanted, and that wanting nothing did not make them disappear? The more I tried to construct a sentence, the more exposed I felt. Language seemed to strip away the small protection of silence.

Silence, at least, allowed me to pretend I still owned the story.

But the name changed that ownership. PGAD did not make the experience less intimate. It made it harder to deny. It turned the secret into something that could be researched, recognized, and perhaps judged. I was relieved to know that I was not the only person in the world whose body could behave this way. At the same time, I felt newly connected to a reality I had not chosen and did not know how to escape.

There was loneliness in being recognized by a term no one around me seemed to know.

I carried the letters through the hours, testing how they felt in my mind. Sometimes they seemed like a diagnosis. Sometimes they seemed like an accusation. Sometimes they were the only evidence I had that my experience was real. That last part mattered most. When the sensations made me question myself, the name gave me something solid to hold on to. I could not control my body, but I could identify what was happening to it.

Still, identification was not acceptance.

I was not ready to make peace with a body that had stopped feeling like home. I was not ready to speak about it without shame. I was not ready to believe that being affected so intensely did not make me defective. The name had opened a door, but behind it waited every fear I had tried to avoid: fear of disbelief, fear of ridicule, fear of being desired for the wrong reasons, and fear that my own desire would become impossible to separate from the disorder controlling me.

The word followed me, quiet and relentless. It made each sensation feel witnessed, even when I was alone. It reminded me that my body had become a problem I could neither conceal from myself nor explain to anyone else.

And because I could not yet tell the truth aloud, I began preparing for another kind of survival: learning how to look normal while carrying a name that had changed everything.

Inventing a Normal Girl Costume

Once I had a name for what was happening to me, I expected the name to make everything easier. It did not. PGAD explained something, but explanation was not the same as relief. My body remained restless, insistent, and impossible to ignore. The word gave shape to the problem without giving me a way out of it. I could point to it in my mind, but I could not place it anywhere outside myself. I still had to move through the world carrying a secret no one could see.

So I began inventing a normal girl costume.

It was not made of fabric. It was made of expressions, gestures, and careful silences. I practiced looking untroubled when I was not. I learned to keep my face composed while every second inside me felt occupied by a sensation I could neither command nor explain. I tried to make my body appear ordinary, even though ordinary was the one thing it no longer felt like.

The costume had to be convincing. I imagined that everyone was watching for evidence that I was different, that they might notice the way my attention slipped or the way I fought to remain still. I treated every movement as something that could betray me. A shift in my seat, a pause before answering, a moment when my eyes lost focus—each one seemed dangerous. I became an investigator of myself, searching for signs that I had failed.

There was no audience in the room, perhaps, but I behaved as though there were. The fear of being seen grew larger than the chance of being understood. I did not want anyone to decide that I was excessive, shameless, or broken. I was already afraid of being too much. The sensations were too much. The thoughts they interrupted were too much. The need to escape them was too much. Even the effort of hiding them became too much, yet I could not stop performing.

A normal girl, I decided, did not have to negotiate with her own body every moment. She could sit through a class without turning stillness into a private battle. She could listen to a conversation without wondering whether her face was revealing something humiliating. She could walk into a room without calculating how quickly she might need to leave. She did not have to carry a question that had no comfortable place in ordinary conversation.

I tried to become that girl by subtraction. I removed whatever might draw attention. I kept my words measured. I avoided explaining too much. When I felt overwhelmed, I swallowed the reaction before it reached my face. When my body demanded recognition, I answered with denial. I told myself that if I refused to acknowledge what was happening, perhaps it would lose its power. Instead, denial turned the secret into a second presence beside me.

It followed me everywhere. It sat with me when I studied. It entered classrooms with me. It stood between me and the people I wanted to trust. I could not set it down, and I could not tell anyone where I had found it. The more carefully I concealed it, the more completely it seemed to define me. I was not only Geenso anymore. I was Geenso trying not to look like a person whose body had become unpredictable.

The hardest part was the gap between what I felt and what others could see. From the outside, I remained recognizable. I was still a young woman among other young people, still moving through days that appeared to have familiar outlines. Nothing about my face announced the private emergency. That invisibility should have comforted me. Instead, it made the loneliness sharper. If there had been a visible wound, someone might have asked what happened. If I had carried proof in my hands, perhaps I could have placed it before another person and said, Look. This is why I cannot be normal today.

But there was no proof that felt simple enough to offer. There was only an experience that sounded impossible when spoken aloud and shameful when imagined through someone else’s ears. I feared that the word desire would swallow the word suffering. I feared that people would hear only sexuality and miss the loss of control. I feared they would think I wanted the condition because it involved sensations that were supposed to be pleasurable. Pleasure, when it could not be chosen, no longer felt like freedom. It felt like another demand my body made without asking me.

Because I could not trust the world with the truth, I tried to make the truth smaller inside myself. I called it a problem. I called it an inconvenience. I treated it as something I should be strong enough to manage. Strength, I thought, meant continuing without complaint. It meant keeping the costume in place even when the seams were cutting into me.

Yet the costume did not protect me from my body. It only made me more alone with it. Every successful performance created another reason to remain silent. If I had looked fine yesterday, why would anyone believe that today was unbearable? If I could answer a question, walk into a room, or complete an ordinary task, what explanation could justify the chaos underneath? I began to understand how easily a person could disappear behind an appearance that everyone accepted.

At times, I almost believed the performance myself. I would catch a glimpse of the girl I was trying to imitate and mistake her calm for my own. Then the sensation would return, or the awareness of it would rise again, and the illusion would split. The normal girl costume could cover me, but it could not change what lived beneath it. It could not quiet the body, and it could not answer the questions accumulating in my mind.

Who was I if my body refused to belong to me? Was I still allowed to call myself disciplined when discipline could not silence it? Was I still innocent if desire arrived without permission? Was I responsible for feelings I had not invited? I had no answers, only the growing certainty that other people’s assumptions could become another kind of prison.

I kept wearing the costume because I did not yet know what else to wear. I wore it to protect myself from judgment, to preserve the fragile shape of my ordinary life, and to keep from becoming a subject of fascination or pity. Beneath it, I remained frightened and exhausted. Beneath it, I was waiting for someone to understand that what looked like desire could also be distress.

The costume helped me pass. It did not help me live. And the longer I wore it, the more I wondered whether anyone—including me—would remember what my real face looked like.